Managers are used to being judged by statistics: games won and lost, goals scored and conceded, shots on target, percentage of possession, money spent, and recouped, in the transfer market.

Joe Kinnear got judged by a different set of stats while he was Newcastle's interim manager, and they looked like this: 36 f-words, six b-words, four c-words; swearword total: 53. And that was just one press conference.

It turned out he was unhappy with reporting of his leadership of the club, and wanted to make his feelings known to local journalists. "I can't trust any of you," he said, in one of few full sentences safe for a family audience, before setting out his policy for dealing with the press. "I will pick two local papers and speak to them and the rest can fuck off. I ain't coming up here to have the piss taken out of me. I have a million pages of crap that has been written about me. I'm ridiculed for no reason. I'm defenceless. It's ongoing. It just doesn't stop."

To be fair, managers are under a lot of pressure and exposed to a great deal of public scrutiny, and over time it is easy to imagine this burden becoming hard to bear, and cracks starting to show. Thing is, at the time of his savage press conference, Kinnear had been at Newcastle for precisely one week.

Reporters at the manager's press conference that followed Chelsea's 1-0 win at Everton in April 2008 could only dream about hearing 53 expletives. Despite a victory and a performance that proved, as the Guardian's match report put it, that "Chelsea were evidently superior to Everton", Avram Grant's post-match performance was both silly and sullen. In five minutes and 39 seconds of semi-silence Grant produced only 137 words, of which eight were "no", one was "yes", 21 were "I don't know" and five were "I have nothing to say". "He looked and sounded pathetic," we said, "his mumbling, incoherent comments undermining a pre-match appeal to be taken seriously."

Strangely his interview with the BBC, conducted moments before the press conference, had been entirely unremarkable, and after delivering his thoughts on the game to Radio 5 Live he was asked about his job security. "I've been in life for many years now and pressure is part of it," he said. "Journalists who say we are having a bad season are trying to do their job, but maybe not in the right way." Grant's contract with Chelsea was terminated the following month.

For a while, it was just an ordinary press conference. Rafael Benítez seemed relaxed as he looked ahead to Liverpool's visit to Stoke City but then he was asked about Sir Alex Ferguson, who had recently suggested that Benítez's side, leading the Premier League at the time, would choke under the pressure. He reached into a jacket pocket and retrieved a piece of paper. He unfolded it and started to read. What came next was premeditated reputation suicide. "Maybe they are nervous because we are at the top of the table but I want to talk about facts," he said, introducing the word which he was to repeat five times in the next few minutes, and which continues to haunt him. "All managers need to know is that Mr Ferguson can talk about the fixtures, can talk about referees and nothing happens," he said. "We need to know that I am talking about facts, not my impression. There are things that everyone can see every single week."

Inevitably, Liverpool did choke, and United won the league. Ferguson and Benítez continue to feud, with the Scot dismissing the Spaniard as "lucky" when he was appointed by Chelsea last year, and Benítez still sticking by his controversial three-year-old comments. "I always try to concentrate on my job but at that time with Ferguson I was defending my club," he said recently. "I could see what was happening from my point of view, and maybe now a lot of people are seeing the same things. I will not talk too much about that because it's obvious. What I said at that time was what I thought and what I'm seeing now is similar."

Things were not going well for Giovanni Trapattoni at Bayern. Three successive defeats had brought out the critics, some of whom were members of his squad: Thomas Strunz, Mehmet Scholl and Mario Basler had all spoken about a lack of harmony between the players and the manager.

Trapattoni wanted to defend himself and he wanted to do it in German. The fact that he could not speak German was not going to stop him, and what he lacked in linguistic fluency he made up for in a virtuoso display of table-banging fury. "These players complain more than they play!" he fumed. "Strunz! Strunz has been here two years, played 10 games, is always injured! How dare Strunz!" The players, Trapattoni said, were "weak like a bottle empty", and finally he concluded with the words "Ich habe fertig", literally "I have ready", but intended to mean "I have finished".

The conference was swiftly turned into a rap song, some of Trapattoni's more bizarre phrases, particularly his sign-off, immediately entered popular usage and Strunz has since credited the outburst with setting him up for a career in the media once he hung up his boots. "I was shocked. Suddenly my name was everywhere. People insulted and made fun of me," he told goal.com in 2011. "But in order to work in television, as I do now, I needed a certain degree of notoriety. Trapattoni brought this to me."

At the start of 2003 Atlético's charismatic if somewhat overweight president had a pacemaker fitted, and proceeded to test it out by attending his side's first game of the new year, a thrilling if chaotic 4-3 defeat to Villarreal. After which, he told SER radio precisely what he thought. "It was an absolute disgrace," he raged. "There's too many bloody passengers. Lluís Carreras, Santi and Jorge Otero are not good enough. I feel like not paying them and anyone who doesn't like it can die!" As Gil, who once claimed over £550,000 on expenses for women's underwear and insisted they were gifts for visiting officials – "nobody told me there was a prohibition on panties and bras!" – became increasingly agitated the interviewer interjected, to remind him of his recent surgery. "I'm sick of people telling me to relax," he was told. "They can stick my heart up their arses!" Gil's heart gave up for the last time a little over a year later.